In this interview, conducted by correspondence in November 1992, Cheung answers questions from a fellow scholar of American studies concerning Asian American, multicultural and comparative literature as well as sexual and cultural politics. Cheung discusses her turn from English Renaissance to Asian American literature, her scholarship on cross-cultural and textual “silences,” her position in the gender war among contemporary Asian American writers, her mediation of feminism and cultural nationalism and of Asian and Asian American cultures. The interview is followed by an “Afterword” in which Cheung describes her impression of the conference on Cultural Identity and Chinese American Literature.

Here the author interprets Kingston’s China Men as a special kind of historiographic metafiction--a “revisionist” novel which counters traditional historiography with an alternative mode of telling and reimagines the past to make room for a different future. Kingston’s “talk story” technique allows her, by interweaving oral and literary traditions and a polyphonic multiplicity of narratives, to fracture and subvert both Chinese patriarchal and white American authority. Like Foucault's genealogy, talk-story thus “fragments what was thought unified” by decentering, disseminating and interrogating authority. But Kingston embellishes historical data and received myths with imagined details; she mixes fact and fantasy to herald a world grounded in reciprocity rather than domination.

This comparative study of classical Chinese and Western theories of literary genre notes that finally. there are no fixed absolute generic rules or standards, and that literature changes and develops precisely by breaking through these conventions. Thus a key concept shared by Chinese and Western theory is that of a hierarchy or ranking of genres. But while some classical Chinese theories as well as Hegelianism, Darwinism and Formalism in the West argue for a kind of pre-determined “evolution” of generic forms, modern theorists like Bergson, Croce and Wellek have felt that literary genres change and develop in freer, more spontaneous ways.

Pearl Buck’s My Several Worlds (1954) and Emily Hahn‘s China to Me (1944) articulate a field of cultural experience whose gender-specific character is superimposed on the distinctiy American rhetoric of empire as it pertains to China. Buck's humanitarian mission and Hahn's unconventional encouragement of travelers’ contact with natives are two feminine/feminist responses to mainstream Western colonialism. Both authors align themselves, in ‘different ways, with America’s self-image as a more humane, liberal and “feminized” alternative to the patriarchal, imperialist European powers. The contradictions that infuse their works, which criticize American injustice and hypocrisy while subscribing to American policies, are symptomatic of American's polarized self-image and of the new leadership role that America forges for itself. For self-criticism and its counterpart, the ever more intense desire to “do good,” is part of a strategy of political legitimation by which America sets itself up as the rightful heir to European hegemony.

This paper claims that martial arts fiction is a literary genre dating back to the Tang Dynasty, and warrants some introduction to non-Chinese readers since it is a major genre in comtemporary Chinese literature, and is a vehicle for transmitting Chinese cultural values. Hong Kong publisher Louis Cha (a.k.a. Jin Yong) is taken as a good example of a contemporary author whose stories give the reader not only details of swordplay and boxing, but also the teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Also discussed in some detail are the special problems in translating such works containing classical allusions, metaphysical ideas, religious rites, “address terms (i.e. titles of address), etc. The author illustrates how to handle such difficult fictions (containing technical jargon and slang describing martial moves) by “recreative translation. of several paragraphs from one of Jin Yong’s works, Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain.

Book Review: Zhang Longxi: The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Durham and London, Duke UP, 1992)